Getting Cold and Goals vs Systems and Habits

Get comfortable with being uncomfortable, is a good mantra if a person or people in a relationship, or a business want to avoid stagnation and grow. If you are not growing, you are doing what exactly? Hanging around and waiting for death? Seems like a sad existence if you ask me. That's why it's important to find ways to grow. Growth isn't about always getting bigger, or richer, or growing your network or followers. Sure, this can be a pathway to growth, but it's also possible to grow on some of these measures, while not actually doing the kind of growth that will build resilience and fortify you against future risks like shocks from high impact low probability events, unexpected disease, competition from a new startup or a merger that suddenly creates a super competitor.

I joined the Denver Athletic Club in 2016 and one of the reasons I opted in to the Men's Health Club in the DAC is because they have a cold plunge in addition to having a sauna and a steam room. I had become interested in Cold therapy as a way to reduce inflammation and speed recovery through listening to folks like Ben Greenfield and Tim Ferriss. Later that year or possibly in 2017 I read the book, What Doesn't Kill Us by Scott Carney a book about now relatively well know cold and breathing guru Wim Hoff and it totally hooked me into both the power of getting cold and the additional benefits beyond helping you recover from a long run or a hard session in the gym.

So yeah, I've been getting cold for going on 10 years now and it's kept me healthier than I think I would have been without it. I'd like to give some credit to this practice for helping me (along with vaccines) handle COVID 3 times, and keeping my vitals in good place. It seems to help my sleep, my mood, my ability to handle uncomfortable situations. But to this day, I never want to get into the cold. I never want to turn the shower from hot to cold. The blast of the cold water still kinda sucks. There is always a little voice in my head that says, "hey we don't need to do this today". But I've also trained that voice as the trigger to make sure I do it, as I have learned to lean into the resistance and now almost 10 years later I have built a healthy habit that I cherish. I'm the kind of person who can handle getting uncomfortable. I can handle the suck.

I mentioned Atomic Habits in my first post, as I spoke about goals and about some of my motivation for starting this newsletter. I also decided it was a good idea to re-read/listen to the book to see how well I retained it and I recognize that what I did by shifting around my habit of posting content on social media to shifting into a newsletter wasn't a rethink (well it was Clear has another term for it. Habit Stacking. Taking something you are already in the habit of doing and stacking them together. I'm already on this platform everyday, I'm already sharing content most days, and I'm already reading about a book every 10 days, I'm picking up and reading from multiple news sources like The Wall Street Journal The Economist NEWYORKTIMES.COM and Substack listening to Audible and podcasts. So all I had to do with shift a few things around in my day to make time and space for a bit of writing and less thinking about writing.

I also think I slightly overemphasized goals and the importance of goals and SMART goals in being crucial to success. Goals are important, but as James points out in the early part of the book. Many people have goals, many people have smart goals, and many of those people don't win the gold medal, or win the deal, or make their marriage last. It's our habits, which are systems, that determine our success. Goals are simply feedback on the processes that we have in place. You might have a perfectly sketched out set of goals, they might be perfectly alighed with your purpose, but you might still fail to achieve them. What it comes down to says Clear is your habits.

The reality is the it's these routines that matter. Atomic Habits isn't the only book about habits or change. Another great read on this was written before Atomic Habits by Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit. He breaks down the habit loop and helps you understand some of the underlying science of why we do what we do. You've probably heard about people getting "triggered". And while this turn of phrase tends to be more used more in the context of trauma, it's related to habit.

This all relates to change and growth. If you can't escape your habits, you can't grow. If you can't break out of your habit loops, you can't change. So you or your organization has to figure out your triggers. You have to understand your patterns. Is your process a process or just kinda of what you do, because there is a definite difference in my opinion. A process is deliberate and it's thought through. It's also constantly being refined, and the output of the process is being measured. Habits just kind of happen. If you say something is your process, you should be able to explain the parts of the process, the ideal output or result. If you can't explain it, if your best answer is, "I don't know, it's just what I do or just what we as an organization do because that's what we have always done." then you have simply in a habit loop and it will be hard to change or break out of.

Now not all habits are bad, there are good ones and there are bad ones, but that's being a bit judgemental on my part. You are the only one who can decide if a habit is good or bad, the question is if the habit helps you produces results that are satisfying to you or to your organization.